Inquiry testimony a blow for engineering profession: director

“If we agreed with the entrepreneur that we had accommodated them, then we would take 25 per cent (cut of the extra profits) … in cash,” Michel Lalonde, head of engineering firm Génius Conseil (formerly Groupe Séguin), said at the Charbonneau Commission on Wednesday.Photo by
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MONTREAL - Testimony by the head of a local engineering firm at the Charbonneau Commission this week has seriously tarnished the reputation of the engineering profession in Quebec, the director of the province’s professional order of engineers said Friday.

André Rainville, executive director of the 63,000-member Ordre des ingénieurs du Québec, said he was shocked by engineer Michel Lalonde’s testimony Thursday that implicated at least a dozen major engineering-consulting firms in the province in a corrupt system of price-fixing and illegal funding of former mayor Gérald Tremblay’s political party.

“We had no idea in 2009, when we were among the people calling for an inquiry into corruption, that it would end up tarnishing the reputation of the engineering profession,” Rainville told The Gazette in an interview.

Lalonde, president of Génius Conseil, told the commission he actively participated in a system whereby representatives of a dozen major engineering firms colluded to determine which firms would get what city contracts and organized illegal funding of Tremblay’s Union Montreal party. Lalonde said he acted as “a spokesperson” for the firms.

Rainville would not say whether Lalonde is under investigation by the order, which has a disciplinary council to investigate, hold public hearings and, if necessary, sanction any engineer who breaks the professional code of conduct or the law. Sanctions range from a reprimand or a fine, to revocation of the engineer’s licence.

“We can’t reveal the names of people who are under investigation until it gets to the stage of a hearing before the disciplinary committee,” Rainville said. “All I can say is that the disciplinary bureau is watching very closely what is happening at the Charbonneau Commission.”

He said complaints to the order have shot up sharply since 2009, when allegations of corruption in the construction industry began to surface following the creation of the anti-corruption police squad, Operation Hammer.

Before that, the order was investigating on average 80 to 90 complaints a year. Since 2009, the number of request for investigations of members has leaped to 400 to 500 a year, Rainville said, and about half of them are related to alleged fraud and collusion.

Since the beginning of the Charbonneau Commission hearings alone, the order has opened 30 related investigations of its members. As damning as that sounds, Rainville said it is good news for the profession that the Charbonneau Commission is doing this work, and the order is willing to cooperate with the commission in any way it can.

“The majority of engineers exercise their profession with honesty, integrity and ethics ... It is still an honourable profession and if certain people have sullied its reputation, we want to do everything we can to correct that,” he said.

Meanwhile, some of the firms named by Lalonde were also in damage-control mode on Friday.

“We take this very seriously,” said Isabelle Adjahi, director of communications for Genivar Inc., a Montreal-based engineering firm. “We have notified our internal auditor and asked for a thorough examination of all of the calls for tenders our firm had with the city of Montreal from 2001 until the present.”

Adjahi called that exercise a “colossal task” and did not know how long it would take to complete, but she said if any of the firm’s engineers are found to have broken the firm’s code of ethics, there would be serious repercussions.

She said engineers at the firm are required to read the code of ethics and sign a contract agreeing to abide by it, not only when they are hired, but every year at evaluation time.

“The code of conduct has to be respected to the letter,” she said.

A call to SNC-Lavalin, another firm named by Lalonde as being involved in collusion, was not returned Friday. But the company announced Thursday that it has hired a special adviser to conduct an independent review of its internal practices. Michael Hershman, a former special agent with U.S. military intelligence, heads a Virginia-based firm that assists corporations in matters relating to the conduct of senior-level officials.

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